Creating a GOOD slideshow

I'm working on a slideshow set to music, and while I've been working with iPhoto, I'm beginning to worry that it might be too limited for what I'd like to do. I was hoping that some of you out there might have worked on similar slideshows on macs and had better luck than I have.

I need to be able to do the following:

Play back images (obviously)
Play music in background
Adjust duration of individual images in slideshow (2sec, 1.54sec, .45sec, etc.)
Include transitions between slides (zoom, cut right/left, fade, etc.)
Include a beginning and ending text slide (title, credits, etc.)

I know this can be done on a PC, but I don't know if my mac can pull it off. Can iPhoto handle this? If not, is there a mac program out there that CAN do all of these things? I can't spend a ton of money on an application; this is just a little something special I wanted to put together for my fiance.

mac: a waterproof raincoat made of rubberized fabric
MAC: a data communication protocol sub-layer, also known as the Media Access Control
Mac: a brand name which covers several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc.

Good Lord, is it that simple? I had poked around in iPhoto first for obvious reasons, and once I saw their slideshow feature, it didn't even cross my mind that there'd be another slideshow capability in iMovie. I'll tinker around in there tonight then, thanks!

Is it possible to save slideshows in iphoto? I did my first one last night and it was really cool. I didn't see any obvious "save slideshow" button, maybe it was in the pull down menu. I'm at work now so I can't look and see for myself.

Also, can you add your own music in iphoto or do you just get that built in acoustic guitar song (which is nice in its own right).

I have a question rleated to this, I only have version 4 something of iPhoto and iDVD is there anywhere I can download better transitions/wipes etc. I would really like some more advanced transitions that i've heard on on the latter versions.

Is it possible to save slideshows in iphoto? I did my first one last night and it was really cool. I didn't see any obvious "save slideshow" button, maybe it was in the pull down menu. I'm at work now so I can't look and see for myself.

Also, can you add your own music in iphoto or do you just get that built in acoustic guitar song (which is nice in its own right).

What I did was I highlighted the Slideshow on the left menu field then went to Export in the pulldowns. It allowed me to export the slideshow as a quicktime movie which I then could play anywhere.

Under the Music setting in the slideshow options there is a place where you can select any song from your Itunes library. Also once you've finished you can hit the iDVD icon at the bottom and it exports it to iDVD where you can add better transitions and also get the music to match the slideshows timing perfectly.

I just did a slideshow recently. I exported my slideshow from iPhoto with no music, then added it to iMovie and added multiple songs and sent it to iDVD. The only problem i encountered was iDVD kept stalling at the Encoding Audio part...untill i figured i had to convert the MP3's i used to AIFF format. Then it was all good.

iMovie is good for the slideshow stuff, but it's kind of slow for importing everything, or at least i found.

Thanks, all. I'll take a stab at iMovie tonight and see what's what. It is more of a presentation I want to put together, and I'm really hoping it turns out well.

Okay, so I've been working with iMovie to make this slideshow for a little while now, and so far adding pictures and adjusting their durations seems fairly straightforward. One thing I can't figure out how to do, however, is do a test run of how it will look AND get the music to play. I've gone to the audio section, found the song I want to use, and told it to place at playhead, but I can never get the song to actually play. I downloaded the song through the iTunes store, so I wouldn't think there'd be any compatibility issues (though its extension is m4p, not mp3), but I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.

The thing is, I'm really going to need to do a lot of playing and re-playing of the slideshow so that I can tweak the slide durations to match changes in the tempo of the song, but thus far, I've had no luck. Could anyone help me figure out what I'm doing wrong?

*Edit: okay, just nosed around in the help section, and it says that iMovie can play either .AIFF files or .mp3 files. If that's it, than I have no idea how to get this song from .m4p to .mp3 (iTunes won't let me convert to other formats). Anyone ever run into this problem?

if you go into itunes preferences, under the Importing tab in the Advanced section and change it to import using the aiff or mp3 encoder, then you can just right click on the song and select Convert Song to whichever.